Haven’t you ever wondered why States of the United States of America seem to keep sponsoring, voting for, and even occasionally passing laws and bills that they know will never go into effect on constitutional grounds?

I’m referring to various violent video-game laws, Arizona’s HB2625 which allows employers to pry into contraception usage of female employees and fire them if they don’t like the answers, and so on. Often these laws are just rewrites of previous laws which also failed to pass.

Copyright is an interesting beastie, and a very necessary one. Without Copyright law, most open source licences and Creative Commons licenses would be worthless. Copyright is enshrined in the United States constitution, offering a limited-time protection on works to everybody. That includes folks like you and me who don’t have works worth hundred of millions of dollars, and who might not have the ability to mount a lawsuit.

Copyright is for everybody, even if your means are scant and your works only commercially worth a few cents. That’s why the United States Copyright office wants to hear from you, as a part of a congressional enquiry into remedies for Copyright small claims.

There’s only really so many ways to verify the age of someone that you’ve never seen (actually, it often isn’t all that much easier in person, but that’s another story).

You can treat them as if they’re of-age if they have a credit card, but that’s inaccurate and a violation of credit-card merchant agreements (symptoms include suddenly having to change payment providers).

You can match identification document information against an identification provider like Aristotle-Integrity, but that’s unreliable and fraught with issues, and doesn’t prove that the information describes the applicant.

There must be a simpler way to verify Second Life accounts as adults! Oh, wait…. here it is!